Software #8 – Xat



www.xat.com




Use in Educational Setting –

Polling questions are a fantastic way of gauging students thoughts and ideas. Xat provides an open-source option for teachers to create interactive polls. Creating a Xat poll allows the teacher to customize the question, the potential answers, the number of answers and the number of answers to each question. Xat poll questions are a useful tool for any educational setting.


Cost, Registration Issues –

Xat is a completely free service to users. There isn’t any registration either, you only have to log onto the website and customize the different values of the poll. Xat also has a chat room option to create a chat room with the same customizing options.


Useful in what content and value to classroom –

Using a poll question for any educational classroom is a useful tool. Poll questions provide a different way of gauging students understanding. Xat polls are a useful tool for any content area; in a history class you could put a few poll questions on a personal site to see how many students know a correct year for an event. In an English class you could poll students on the correct wording for a sentence. There are a lot of options available to teachers and students when using poll questions.


Meta-cognition and Xat–
Putting the learning and understanding into the student’s hands is exactly what meta-cognition is about. Poll questions force the students to explore and conquer their own knowledge. The use of poll questions allow students to challenge themselves to find the correct answer.



Xat Product -

Screen shots from Xat showing how to build a poll and what the poll looks like.
xat-poll_shot.jpg

xat_-_building_poll.jpg